E-Mich - "Citizens' accountability in the ballot box”

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Emanuela Ceva & Nenad Stojanović (Université de Genève)

We develop a novel approach to address democratic electoral discrimination – i.e. when voters penalize candidates running for office on the ground of an adverse bias towards the candidates’ group membership – through the lenses of “office accountability”. We show how citizens qua officeholders should act in their institutional capacity in such a way that puts them in the position to vindicate the rationale of their action as coherent with the terms of their power of office mandate. Hence, when they act on their preferences in the ballot box, their action is not inherently objectionable insofar as they are in the position to vindicate it in view of the right to be governed by whoever they choose. But this does not imply that their power mandate is or ought to be fully unbound. Electoral discrimination may still have a negative impact on citizens’ democratic right to run for office. In this case, careful institutional design allows to mitigate such negative effects...